DUH
"Well, duh." Zane stuffed his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. "What the hell, Lupo? What kind of guy do you think I am?"
The guns in Jo's hands lowered again. Her lips parted as if she would say something before she forced a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I guess I don't really know."
"If your alternate universe version of me would murder these guys, you're better off without him."
Jo's smile looked more genuine. "No. He would never."
"Oh, but I would?" Zane rolled his eyes. "Nice, Lupo, nice. A few computer-related crimes and some harmless pranks and suddenly I'm a cold-blooded killer? Thanks loads." He meant the words to sound nonchalant, mocking, as if he were immune to the insult, but he could feel anger simmering in his voice. And maybe, just maybe, although he could barely bring himself to admit it, underneath the anger was hurt. How could Jo think so little of him?
Jo bit her lip. She looked away from him, as if to avoid the accusation in his eyes. "The idea occurred to me. Maybe that makes me a worse person than you."
"Oh." Zane's anger dissipated. His hand in his pocket closed around the pill bottle. He'd remembered it was there, known he must have put it in the box for a reason. That, plus the lack of ropes or handcuffs, had given him clues to what his future self had done. If he'd been in Jo's place, what would he have been thinking? Not murder, that was for sure. But then he wasn't a soldier. "Maybe that makes you military."
He could see that the soldiers were listening now, all three of them, the sergeant still with his head turned, trying to see. Zane crouched down, near them, but not close enough for them to attack.
"All right, listen up, guys. Here's the deal. You work at a top-secret military facility founded by Albert Einstein and paid for by the US government. It's classified so deep that your letters home are probably black with redactions. No one on the planet is supposed to know anything about it, right?"
None of the soldiers answered him.
"We do, because we're from the future." He ignored the breath of surprise Jo took at his revealing words and the skeptical expressions on the faces of the soldiers. "Long story short, I'm sure you know a guy named Trevor Grant. Dark hair, smarmy attitude, big-time asshole."
One of the soldiers made a noise that might have been a half-muffled laugh, and the sergeant winced, closing his eyes as if the name pained him.
"Thought so," Zane said. "Big brain, badly used. He's about to mess up the world in a major way. We're here to fix his screw-up."
Jo cleared her throat. Zane glanced over his shoulder at her. She tilted her gun-toting hands to the sides as if to ask him what the hell he was doing. He shrugged. Okay, it wasn't the whole story, but it got the point across. Plus, when you were trying to get someone on your side, having a common enemy was always a positive and he just knew Trevor Grant would have annoyed the soldiers as much as he annoyed Zane. Grant might be brilliant, but he was also a pretentious bozo.
"This screw-up is big. Like world-shattering big. Like the atomic bomb was just a flyswatter big. And having you guys find us when you did could totally mess with our chance to save the planet." Zane paused to check his audience's reactions. The guy who'd made a noise before seemed to be buying it. The sergeant, though, had narrowed eyes, as if he were calculating the distance to grab Zane's throat. Zane poked him in the shoulder, hard, staring at him until the sergeant blinked.
"This is a clusterfuck," Zane said sternly. "You hear me? I should maybe mention that you were taken down by a teenage girl and her mom. That the kind of future you're looking forward to? The one where girls and their mothers spend quality time preparing to defend themselves against armed men?" Zane tipped his chin toward the third soldier, the one who'd taken Amy's first hit. "Back in your time, I bet girls fought fair. No going straight for the cojones, am I right?"
The soldier looked blank.
"Nuts? Balls? Privates?" Zane added, getting more exasperated with each word until the soldier shifted as if moving his hands to protect his delicate parts against aggressive teenagers.
Zane jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Jo. "Most marksmanship titles in Special Forces history, graduated top of her class at West Point. That's the face of the future army, men. Drop-dead gorgeous, isn't she?"
"Cut it out, Donovan." Jo sounded more resigned than annoyed. "What do you think you're doing, anyway?"
"Standard Terminator protocol. Nobody ever believes time travelers initially. Got to prove the future is crazy first and I'm guessing having someone as hot as you be the ranking officer on the scene ought to do it. What were you when you left the army?"
"I was a captain when I was deployed to Eureka. But I never exactly left the army. My assignment in Eureka was special ops."
"Hear that?" Zane directed his words to the soldiers again. "She can recite lots more jargon if you need it. But she's way ahead of you on the rank train. Of course, she won't even be born until you're grandpas, if you're lucky."
A muscle twitched in the cheek of the sergeant.
Reassured, Zane continued. "You guys have a choice now. Well, more than one choice. You can refuse to believe me, because hey..." He spread his hands wide. "...all Soviet spies travel with a bunch of girls in tow. By the way, the Soviet Union collapses sometime in the 1980's and is nothing to worry about before then. The Cold War is bogus." He closed his hands into fists. "Or you can accept that what I'm telling you is reality."
"And then what?" the sergeant finally spoke.
"First option, you take us all into GD. We won't fight. Of course, we will tell the whole truth and nothing but when we get there, including the little detail about you getting your asses kicked by a sixteen-year old girl and her mom." Zane stood, feeling the need for momentum. "You guys become the laughingstocks of your platoon or battalion or whatever the hell is it—I'm not army—and the future shoots straight down toward a disaster that no one's managed to resolve despite decades of trying. Or we can go for a walk. The three of you and me. We get far enough away from here that you don't automatically get traced back to the bunker and you take some pills."
"What pills?" Jo and the sergeant asked the question at the same time.
Zane pulled one hand out of his pocket, the bottle he'd found earlier enclosed in it. He tilted it up and read the label aloud, pronouncing the unfamiliar word carefully. "Flunitrazepam IV. Mean anything to you?"
The sergeant looked blank, but behind him, Jo gasped.
"Roofies? Do you routinely carry roofies around with you?" she hissed, her tone pure poison.
A/N: Thank you to Stoic, Tiffany, Autumn, and Caroline for the reviews! I'm hoping to finally finish this story and if I do, it will be because you guys cared enough to take the time to write a review. I wouldn't be writing without it! Thank you!